Rabbi's Messages

on Monday, 12 January 2015.

A SERMON FOR SHEMOT 5775

This week’s horrific events in Paris have touched us deeply. For a lot of reasons – because Wednesday’s shooting at the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine hit at the heart of our freedom of speech, one of our most sacred freedoms. Because today’s hostage situation occurred in a kosher grocery, in a Jewish neighbourhood. Because tonight, synagogues in France are dark for the first time since the Holocaust. People afraid to attend their houses of worship, being warned by the government to stay home.
 
When things like this happen, our natural human impulse is to want to find someone to blame. Whose fault is this? Is it the fault of a particular community? Of a specific religious group? Of religion in general?
 
This past week, Egypt’s President - Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, publicly worried about the increasing violentization of the Muslim world. He said: “It is unbelievable that the thought we hold holy pushes the Muslim community to be a source of worry, fear, danger, murder and destruction to all the world,” He called for no less than “a religious revolution” in the Muslim world. (NY TImes: Raising Questions Within Islam After France Shooting.)
 
And other voices expand that, blaming religion in general. Religion, they say, divides and polarizes people. It pushes us to hate one another and to focus on points of difference and contention, rather than commonality.
 
There is no doubt that religion has been the source of a great deal of violence throughout history. And there is no doubt that Jews have been the victims of a great deal of that violence, though we’ve been the perpetrators of some of it as well. But as a liberal Jew and a religious person, I have to reject the notion that religion is somehow inherently violent. That religion, by its very definition polarizes people. I have to reject the notion in itself leads to hate. But I have to accept that it plays a role in it. If not, there wouldn’t be so much religious-based violence around there world. There wouldn’t be so many people killing and dying in the name of God.
 
So what is the connection, the bridge between religion and hate?
Mahatma Gandhi once said, “The enemy is fear. We think it is hate; but, it is fear.”
 
This week’s Torah portion teaches us about the danger of fear, and about the ways that it can lead us to hatred and violence. We read this week from parashat Shemot. It is the first portion in the book of Shemot, or Exodus, and it begins the saga of the Jewish people’s descent into slavery and our Exodus to freedom.
 
וְאֵלֶּה שְׁמוֹת בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל הַבָּאִים מִצְרָיְמָה אֵת יַֽעֲקֹב
These are the names of the children of Israel who came to Egypt along with Jacob. (Exodus 1:1)
 
And it goes on to list them: 2 Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah; 3 Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin; 4 Dan and Naphtali, Gad and Asher. 5 Seventy people in all, and Joseph was already in Egypt.
 
But from there, the story turns dark almost immediately:
 וַיָּמָת יוֹסֵף וְכָל־אֶחָיו וְכֹל הַדּוֹר הַהֽוּא:
Joseph died, and all his brothers, and all that generation.
 וַיָּקָם מֶֽלֶךְ־חָדָשׁ עַל־מִצְרָיִם אֲשֶׁר לֹֽא־יָדַע אֶת־יוֹסֵֽף:
And a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. (Exodus 1:6-8 )
 
This, of course, is the Pharaoh who will enslave the Israelites. The one who will treat them as an enemy and who will oppress them and embitter their lives. And the Torah begins its story by pointing out what about him? That he did not know Joseph. The Etz Hayim says, “He was ignorant of or indifferent to the extraordinary service that Joseph had rendered to Egypt.”
 
And it was that ignorance and/or indifference that led to his animosity toward the Jews.
 
The author H. P. Lovecraft wrote, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
 
It was fear that led the Pharaoh to enslave the people. Fear of something that he did not know, did not understand, and did not attempt to understand. The very next verse proves it. He says, “ הָבָה נִּֽתְחַכְּמָה לוֹ - Let us deal shrewdly with them. Otherwise in the event of war they may join our enemies in fighting against us."”
 
He had no real, rational reason to believe that the Israelites would join his enemies. But his fear led him to cruelty and hatred. It was fear that caused our oppression. It was fear that made us slaves. And it is is fear that leads people to do horrific things to each other, all around the world, in the name of religion or nationalism or whatever other excuse we come up with.
 
When we mourn the victims of the Charlie Hebdo attack, what we are mourning is that fear and ignorance have so violently and so disgustingly encroached on modern people’s right to express themselves, and to disagree with one another. When we mourn the victims of today’s hostage situation, what we are mourning is that fear and ignorance have hit violently at the heart of our own community, curtail our right to live and worship and believe as Jews. This is the tragedy of extremism.
 
Our prayer is this: If religion can help engender fear, it can also help dispel it. And this is true. If we look around us, we can see instances all over the world of religious communities working together to build bridges of understanding and peace between communities. We see this in Israel, where our Reform Movement is deeply involved in Jewish-Arab dialogue. We see it right here here, in our annual “Open Doors, Open Minds” lecture at Kol Ami. I would argue that the power of religion is that it has the ability to move people’s thinking and influence their actions. Whether that influence is for good or for evil, is up to us. 
In the 21st century, religion needs to be a force for good - to help us focus on commonalities rather than differences, to help us understand that we are all God’s children. We have a LOT of work to do.We can do so by increasing our dialogue with other communities – even those who are very different from us (maybe especially those who are very different from us.) We can do it by reaching out to those whose practices and beliefs are foreign to us.
Bertrand Russell once said, “To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”
On this Shabbat, as we mourn the victims of hatred and fear, may we commit ourselves, and commit our religious community, to be builders of wisdom, to be proponents of understanding and dialogue, to be champions of peace. And someday, may the world around us reflect those values as well.
 Amen.